The 3 Ways People React to Career Disasters

It’s not how hard you fall, but how you pick yourself up that really matters. That is what we learned from 9000+ responses to our HBR survey on bouncing back from career setbacks. Resilience alone won’t cut it—you need to do some serious self-reflection.

We worked with Douglas (Tim) Hall, a leading expert on careers, and his doctoral student Lan Wang of Boston University’s School of Management to analyze the data about how managers said they recovered. Three overall patterns emerged. Some stewed over their loss and got stuck in a cycle of self-justification. Others tried to work through their setbacks but struggled to adapt to their new realities. But nearly half of respondents focused on learning from their loss through “identity work”—they thought about the role they played, sought opinions from different people, and took steps to care for themselves. They were the ones able to move forward most effectively.

The idea that you have to “work through” your feelings after a setback might seem self-indulgent to some but it may be the most productive route forward. No matter what their initial reactions, those who took a hard look at themselves, and spent time considering their careers and interests, were least likely to lurch into an aggressive job search and most likely to say, in the end, that their career loss was a good thing.

Hall has identified two competencies as crucial in successfully navigating today’s careers: personal adaptability and identity development. According to Hall, personal adaptability hinges on the “predisposition to scan and read external signals consciously and continuously.” Here we found that those managers who tried to understand the situation from all vantages and sought opinions from lots of different people were most apt to realize “I might have prevented what happened if I’d done certain things differently.”

However adaptability alone is not sufficient for moving forward smartly in your career. Hall writes that identity development that focuses on “a person’s ‘self-system,’ representing the person’s image of herself or himself in relation to the environment,” is also needed. Some executives fear that identity work leads to self-doubt and paralysis, especially when the situation calls for action. But the survey results provide an apt counterpoint.

Those who leapt into an aggressive job search absent of self-reflection were far more likely than other managers to keep operating as usual—and to have concluded that their career loss was “one of the worst things that ever happened to me.” Those who turned to identity work, by comparison, were more likely to experiment with new ways of working and also focused on “finding a good fit.” They were most likely to say that their loss was one of the best things to happen to them.

What the survey results show is that both adaptability and identity work are necessary in order to learn from and move forward after a career setback. In other words, winning at losing means not just traversing the stages of anger and grief, but also being open to the possibility of emerging from the twilight zone with a new sense of self that can guide how you respond to changing organizational realities. On this point, Hall believes that managers today need a more “protean” approach to career development. Like the Greek god Proteus, they must be able to change their shape to adapt to new situations. And as people move through successive stages of their careers, and their experience pool becomes richer and more complex, their sense of self must also grow—and this demands regular self-reflection to maintain an integrated personal identity.

From our experience, the formula for winning at losing is to become untethered from past success and to explore broader definitions of what it means to win both personally and professionally. This gives you a better chance to find self-expression and meaning at work, and while your next position may not be perfect, you’ll have a better sense of self, clearer intent, a plan of action for going forward, and experience you can draw on when you need it.

Philip Mirvis is an organizational psychologist whose studies and private practice concerns large-scale organizational change, the character of the workforce and workplace, and business leadership in society. An advisor to businesses and NGOs on five continents, he has authored twelve books on his studies including Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship.